


sing to me on this long drive home

by storm_petrel



Series: I saved the galaxy and all I got was this stupid N7 hoodie [2]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types
Genre: Accidental Pregnancy, Destroy Ending, F/M, Grief, Post-Mass Effect 3, dumbfucks in love, getting through it with your found space family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:07:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26518726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storm_petrel/pseuds/storm_petrel
Summary: Alcohol, Virgil, mid-20th century Canadian music, The Good Shower, and putting your ship (and your heart, and your head) back together, piece by jury-rigged piece.
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard
Series: I saved the galaxy and all I got was this stupid N7 hoodie [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1928230
Comments: 21
Kudos: 54





	sing to me on this long drive home

**Author's Note:**

> Man oh man, you spend quarantine re-playing the Mass Effect series, and abruptly remember how much you love your idiot space family, and these dumbfucks in love, and then you have to go back and re-write Mass Effect fic from the point of view of the OTHER dumbfuck in love. This one follows/parallels "your mama's got plans and your daddy's aim is true", so you should read that one first. If you're here, I hope you love these dumbfucks and space idiots as much as I do <3

When the dust settles, and the _Normandy’s_ tortured superstructure stops screaming, and everything that’s going to tear apart has already torn apart, Joker’s voice echoes over the comms, distorted and crackling with static.

_“Holy shit,”_ says Joker. _“We’re not dead.”_

He sounds surprised. Kaidan doesn’t blame him.

***

The fact is, Kaidan knows that this all started years ago, a few days after he met her, a few hours after she nearly died.

Back then, he just had his own migraines and moderate PTSD to deal with. Back then, she was just that red-headed looker tapped as Captain Anderson’s XO, who was a slightly better shot than him according to the ship’s unofficial sim rankings, and who was probably too young, and _definitely_ outranked him, a fact he repeated to himself every day until after Eden Prime, a few hours after she’d nearly died. That’s when she stopped to talk to him, and leaned in just a little closer than she had to. Trapped him with those soft dark eyes and the coconut smell of her dark red hair, and asked _how are you holding up?_ Like she hadn’t just spent fifteen hours out cold in the medbay, like she hadn’t shoved him away from the beacon to take the hit herself.

In his more vivid nightmares, she shoves him back and the Prothean beam takes her to pieces, right in front of him. Kaidan sometimes wonders if this isn’t actually what really happened—just, so much more slowly, over years and years.

***

They figure out pretty quickly that they can fix the hull, the engines, the guns, and the radio, pick two.

Nominally, Kaidan’s in command. But they’re a long way out from nothing, and god only knows what’s left of the Alliance command structure, and Kaidan didn’t get this far without listening to good advice, so. Team meetings. They have a lot of team meetings.

Under a tarp, outside behind the engines, because all the chairs in the conference room are shot to shit, but this planet does have a diversity of comfortable rocks to sit on, which puts it one up on some stations where Kaidan’s been assigned. They’ve got three shifts working all hours, so Kaidan calls the all-hands mostly over breakfast, or dinner, or midnight snack, depending on whose shift it is.

Vitamin packs and rationed coffee and six-legged furry thing Garrus shot yesterday. Looks like a tarantula, tastes like chicken, prepared al fresco by stick and fire. Specialty of the house.

They all agree pretty quick that the hull and the engines are the priority. Trainor and Tali have a halfway-reasonable justification that the subspace radio’s range amplification will be hard to manage under this kind of atmospheric distortion and that the engines are going to be a nightmare to fix but there’s a few things they can try—

And no one says it but they’re all probably thinking it. _Normandy_ ’s carried them through every damned mess the galaxy’s thrown at them yet. They could probably get a distress call out. They might even get someone out here on an evac run, maybe even before the coffee runs out. But to leave her alone out here on this wet empty world, with the vines climbing over her and her hull plating corroding away, year after year, lifeless and empty—

Well. They talk about how to get the engines running instead. That’s definitely not going to happen before the coffee runs out, though.

Joker’s eating with one hand, tablet in the other. He hasn’t put it down, not since they found out EDI’s base code was saved in the _Normandy’s_ backup systems. She’s putting herself back together one process at a time and she doesn’t have her voice, but she contributes a line of text whenever she can. _I will have basic emergency systems online in the next 48 hours if Jeff can be trusted to hold a screwdriver. That was a joke._

Joker looks dead on his feet and also like he’ll fight anyone who tries to take the tablet from him. Kaidan doesn’t blame him.

***

Late, late at night and he can’t sleep, hasn’t been sleeping right for more than a week, and there’s nothing Chakwas can give him that wouldn’t mess with his implant, kick off a day or six of grinding, too-bright misery, so he walks instead. Paces the ship, and it’s hot—even at night, it’s clocking in somewhere north of 30 degrees Celsius, even with the vents cranked open wide.

He ends up in the forward battery, eyes burning dry, and so exhausted, but still so far from sleep. The chirp of an omnitool and a huff of breath tells him Garrus isn’t sleeping either, and another night, he’d turn back, but he just needs—

He’s never actually been far enough back in the battery to see where Garrus bunks. If he’d ever thought about it, Kaidan would assume there’s a cot slung back here somewhere, that Garrus sacks out on temperfoam and thermal covers, just like the rest of them, but he rounds the corner and Garrus is almost perpendicular to the floor, hanging in a tangled webwork of strapping like a vertical hammock. It fits around his spurs and his fringe and all that bony protruding plating in a way a standard mattress wouldn’t. His armour’s in bits on the floor. He’s down to shirtsleeves, or the Garrus equivalent.

Breathing steady, but awake. Cracks one blue eye and looks at Kaidan, up, down, and right down to the bone in one quick motion.

So strange to see so much of him, that scarred bony alien skinniness, with his armor like a molted carapace on the floor. Maybe Garrus feels it too, because one mandible twitches. “Little cold back here, Major.”

If Kaidan weren’t so exhausted, he’d laugh, because it’s hotter than hell on a wet day, and even so, that’s a line older than any war either of them ever studied. Long as there’s been sentients killing other sentients, someone’s needed an excuse to crawl into someone else’s bed and just hang on.

He’s too tired to be embarrassed. Just kicks his boots off, next to Garrus’s chestpiece on the deck, and takes a long couple of seconds to figure out how to climb up into that spider’s web without tumbling out on his ass or planting his knee in some important part of Garrus’s anatomy.

Once he gets the weight off his feet, it’s better. Actually pretty comfortable, better airflow than the bunks. Even if he does have his face mashed against a bony plated clavicle, or scapulocoracoid bar, or whatever it is Turians call it. Garrus exhales, chest flexing, and Kaidan’s hair drifts a little as he breathes.

“Go to sleep, Major,” he says, that low gravelly thrum. “There’s nothing worth thinking about this late at night.”

Which is _rich_ , coming from Garrus, who has, in his _actual possession,_ a handmade certificate that reads _Broodiest Motherfucker On This Spaceship,_ because Shepard was kind of a shithead like that and was also a pretty keen hand at arts and crafts, as it happened, because Kaiden never would have been able to keep the lettering that straight. But it’s late, and they’re twined up together, chest to chest, another heart beating in the dark, and Kaidan finally lets the steady in-out of Garrus’s breathing drag him over the edge into sleep.

***

There’s a picture of her, propped up on the bar in the lounge.

They’ve hauled out most of the debris by now, and someone’s left it in the little lit-up corner of the bar. Someone—probably Liara, scholarly cover, and a romantic streak down right through her bedrock—keeps leaving flowers, carried in from the jungle. Today they’re hot pink, shot through with a hallucinogenic violet pattern, and dripping with pollen.

If he’d brought those flowers to her, she’d probably have run him down and beat him to death with them.

The picture, though. There was an old Alliance ad campaign, years back, right after she made SPECTRE and before they really got tangled up with Saren and Sovereign, before Ash died. He remembers that photoshoot, how the official images went out, Shepard in armor way nicer than anything they wore in the field, red hair piled up on her head, eyes sharp and her gun in hand. _Staring nobly for justice,_ she’d said after, wryly, even though she looked like a conquering empress, a virago going to war, and okay, Kaidan can admit to himself, it’s very possible he’d been stupid over her even all the way back then. 

This is not one of the official pictures. Ash took this one, Kaidan remembers, because Shepard had said _I’d appreciate an assist here_ , which had meant _do not make me go to this stupid bullshit picture thing alone,_ and Ash had volunteered. Ash had told him about it, later, when they were hiding out in Flux. The photographer, some famous asshole, had been yelling about lighting and Shepard’s red hair, and when he’d turned to keep yelling at his assistants, Ash took this shot with her omnitool. Systems Alliance Commander Jocasta Shepard, first human SPECTRE and pride of the fleet, eyes rolled and tongue stuck out, both hands in the air with the Turian two-finger gesture for _I shit on your ancestor’s grave,_ and the Quarian gesture for _may all your engines blow in space_. A perfect picture, a perfect little half-second of _Shepard,_ back before she had to bury it all down and step up to the plate. 

Some jackass has left a bottle of Jack Daniels Traditional there. Some _other_ jackass has left a bendy straw.

***

“You know, I thought about making a play for her once,” Garrus says, casually, as they weld cracked hull plating back together.

Kaidan almost falls off the damn hull. Catches himself and catches the unlit welding torch barehanded, _without_ biotics, and any other time he’d be impressed. But right now he’s too busy swinging back towards Garrus and _what the actual hell_ is all lined up to go. Then, that unhelpful corner of his brain reminds him that storming off and deleting all her messages and determinedly staying on the opposite side of the galaxy may have broadcast a pretty clear signal, and—god damn, this _would_ be his own fool fault.

Garrus isn’t really paying attention, though. He shakes his head, flips up his protective mask. “Never bothered, though.” The light catches on his visor’s eyepiece, then, as he turns to look at Kaidan. “Anyone with one good eye could tell you were the only one she ever wanted.”

And, _oh_ , there’s nothing like a Turian for cutting you right up under the ribs, right where you’ve got no armor. Even if Garrus is his friend, fuck, even his _oldest_ friend at this point. Maybe he can’t even help it.

It’s been seventeen days, four hours since the last time he saw her. The last time he kissed her, he had blood in his mouth.

***

Someone’s been writing on the hull plating, down in the access stairs leading to Engineering. Wax pencil on metal, high up on the bulkhead where it doesn’t show unless you’re looking for it. _Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit._

Kaidan doesn’t recognize it. At school, he only read enough of the old European classics to laugh right in her face when Shepard finally told him her first name. Back then, sleeping together was still a habit they were getting into, and she knocked him right off the bed like they were a pair of scrapping kids. He may have let her pin him a little easily, though, because when she writhed on top of him like that, well, he could thread his fingers through her long hair, and then after that, it was all over for him.

On the wall, someone more literary than Kaidan has helpfully written underneath, in a loopy scrawl that looks _suspiciously_ like one of Vega’s signatures from his mission reports, _Perhaps one day we will be glad to remember even this._

Garrus recognizes it, though, because of course he does. He snorts when he sees it. “Virgil should have been a Turian,” he says. “You humans don’t appreciate him the way we do.”

***

No one goes in her quarters until the day Trainor finally snaps, hauls off her sweat-soaked shirt and howls, “ _That’s where the good shower is,”_ and stands there in her sports bra, bantam and trembling and defiant, and there’s a long, frozen moment where nobody reacts, and then Kaidan opens his mouth. Chokes a little and then he’s laughing so hard he nearly falls over. That’s the day when the team meeting declares The Good Shower is in play. Luckily the computer’s been feeding her fish all this time, and fish don’t give a shit.

***

People start going to her quarters, but he hasn’t been sleeping in her bed.

He’s been telling himself it’s better to be down with the crew, down in the rustling, too-hot bunks that are full of the sounds of people breathing, asleep and alive. He knows better, though. There’s nothing but a wide, empty bed up there in her cabin, and the smell of her hair is still on the pillow.

One night, six weeks in, he cracks. Climbs the emergency ladder up because they still don’t have power routed to the personnel lifts, and under the shadowy darkness of the unlit fish tank, he crawls into the bed he used to share with her. There’s a soft tone from the console. EDI, checking up on him, even though she’s barely operational. Putting herself back together and watching out for all of them, because that’s what she does. A line of text on the screen. _Joker suggested something from the mid-twentieth century music library for the previous national territory of your birthplace._

There’s a crackle of static, and then music starts to play, something mellow with old-fashioned guitar. A low, mournful voice, something crackling and old enough to predate digital recording. _I remember you well from the Chelsea Hotel, you were famous, your heart was a legend, and you told me again you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception._

And that—it’s awful and fucked up and it’s _hilarious_. He’s laughing as he falls asleep. He wakes up six hours later and it’s the first time he’s slept through the night since the day the Reapers came.

***

One morning he finds Trainor sitting cross-legged outside the ship, a dropsheet spread under her and one of the smaller outer hull panels dismantled around her. She’s painting; quick, flickering, surprisingly deft strokes. _Normandy_ , scored away by a Reaper blast, but now slowly inking out under the movement of her hands, more like calligraphy than the machine-precision text that used to be there,

It’s pretty. He didn’t know she could paint. She ducks her head when Kaidan compliments it. “It’s who we are,” she says, pushing back her sweaty hair, falling loose from her braid. “It’s important.”

***

Another night, and Kaidan sits up suddenly, breathless and choking, reaching for her.

His fingers close around empty air, and oh god, the smell of her hair is still on the pillow, just the faintest trace and it’s almost gone, and when that’s gone, what will he have left of her?

She’s their commander and she’s their ghost, but Kaidan loved her. He loved her with everything he had, and that _has_ to matter. He wakes up in the dark with her voice fading from his ears, the feel of her hand against his chest gone before he can grab it back, and he digs his fingers though his hair and closes his eyes, tries to breathe through the weight in his chest because he can’t _remember_. How did he ever live through this before?

How does anyone ever live through this?

***

On days when they’re not exhausted from hauling sheet metal and rubble, burned-out wiring and charred insulation, Kaidan spars with Vega.

When you’re at war, the friends you make are different. Friends you’d trust with a shotgun at your six, to cover your back, trust to stand in formation with you and blast back whatever hell the galaxy throws at you, but not, say, with how you feel today because your girlfriend got tapped to save the galaxy. And how she kissed you goodbye with blood in her mouth, and now there’s this crushing weight in your chest because you are not ready for her to be gone, you are not finished with this yet.

It’s a bad day.

And he’s sloppy, feeling it, with all that bad shit up just a little too close to the skin. Moving a little too ragged and hitting a little too hard, and Vega’s not dodging, he’s just taking the hits. Kaidan punches him once-twice in the neck and shoves a knee into the big nerve on Vega’s thigh but Vega’s on him and Vega’s a god damn battering ram, and they both hit the deck, hard.

And then he’s got his knee up, both hands dug into Vega’s shirt, ready for the throw, fabric twisted tight, and he stops for half a second too long, and then it’s three seconds, five and— _oh_ _fuck_ he’s crying. He’s gripping Vega’s shirt, twisted up against him, making this awful, raw, _animal_ sound and he can’t stop, he can’t stop, he can’t _breathe._

And then suddenly Vega’s got his arms around him, pulls Kaidan in tight against him. Face buried against Vega’s heavy chest hard enough that he can just fucking _howl_ , muffled against Vega’s shirt.

Vega’s mouth against his ear, soft, repeating, “It’s okay, hermano. It’s okay. Get it out.”

Down on the floor of the hangar, wrapped up with Vega, for god knows how long. Long enough for Kaidan to realize Cortez or Tali should have passed through by now, and very conspicuously haven’t, and he digs the heels of his palms against his swollen eyes. There’s tears and snot, and a few drops of bright red blood, all over Vega’s white shirt.

“ _Shit_ _. Fuck_.” He wipes his face, and tries to push away, but Vega’s not done with him yet. He rocks back on his heels, and then he’s down on his ass, all four limbs wrapped around Kaidan, Kaidan’s head pinned under his chin like he’s a particularly recalcitrant teddy bear.

“Lola’s gonna kick your ass, you know,” Vega says quietly, against the top of his head. “You’re a slacker boyfriend, leaving her to do all that _hey we_ _fucked up the reapers_ paperwork by herself. And she’s gonna kick mine, for not bringing you back to her faster.”

It startles a laugh out of him, weak and choked up, but real. It makes him settle a little, back against Vega, who seems disinclined to let him go anyway. “I get it, hermano,” says Vega, softly. “You ain’t alone out here.”

***

Liara has been looking at him for the last week, and he can’t work it out, but it’s strange. Stranger than usual, even. She looks like a woman with too much on her mind, but like getting words out into the open is even harder than keeping quiet. Kaidan can relate.

Still, he’s in charge, so one evening after shift change, he catches her arm, gently, and he says, “Liara, do you want to talk?” It’s something Shepard would have done, always did especially when things were accelerating past FUBAR with no end in sight. They’ve been crashed on this planet at the end of nowhere for thirteen weeks and counting now, after the end of all life as they know it, so this definitely qualifies.

And Liara is looking at him, her small blue hand coming up to cover his. And her eyes are suddenly wet, and it’s startling, awful, because he’s _never_ seen Liara cry. “I saw her mind, right before we left Earth.” And then Liara is squeezing his hand hard, and she says, “Oh, Kaidan, I think she was pregnant,” and Kaidan’s brain skids abruptly sideways off the rails.

***

Fifteen and a half weeks in. It’s still night, and EDI pings his omni tool. _Unknown ship entering orbit. Jeff says bring guns._

Outside, everyone on the crew crouched under cover, under the glowing pre-dawn sky. There’s a wary stillness. Like everyone, like the birds and the animals and the whole jungle is holding its breath, waiting, _waiting_ —

And then there’s the ship, a point of light that resolves into a solid mass overhead very quickly.

It looks Quarian—that hodgepodge no-waste approach to design--but the fact remains that it’s absolutely _bristling_ with enormous strapped-on cannons, fore and aft, so everyone stays under cover and keeps their guns raised and ready. No one’s unfriendly here at Normandy Crash Site, Ass End of Universe, but there is a non-zero probability that a thousand fucking husks are going to come pouring out of that thing, and husks are getting supersonic projectiles for breakfast. Any _reasonable_ person coming out can have coffee dregs and some of the six-legged thing that Garrus shot, because it turns out it’s surprisingly good with cayenne pepper.

The ship’s not even landed when the main hatch clanks open, and Kaidan is already moving, already running towards him when that big armored body stomps out into view and Wrex—Wrex, _Wrex—_ growls, “ _Surprise.”_

Garrus is going to have to shoot more six-legged things.

***

“Well, it’s like this,” says Wrex reasonably. The Krogan and the Quarians have brought a lot of rhyncol and somehow, an entire _barrel_ of extremely pure ten-year old Eden Prime grain vodka. They are having a party. It is a _hooray we are not the only people who survived the end of the fucking universe and Wrex came to get us_ party. Someone sent digital invitations to everyone’s omnitool with a smiling cartoon krogan. They are surprisingly cute.

Unsurprisingly, Kaidan is drunk and so is Wrex and they’ve spent the last twenty minutes propping each other up. It’s a nice party. In the glow of the emergency lanterns, Chakwas and Trainor are trying to teach a dozen bemused Quarian techs how to do the quantum slide. “It’s like this,” Wrex says again, maybe for the third time. Kaidan is _very_ drunk. “If Shepard is gone, she died gloriously to save us all from the mother of all shitstorms unending, and we’ll find her on the other side of the Void when the universe dies.” Then Wrex smacks his shoulder, hard enough to bruise, and laughs. “Or Shepard _isn’t_ gone, and _that_ means she’s waiting for you to come back and sire more whelps on her.” Wrex looks abruptly glum. “They’ll probably end up studying Asari poems or complicated math. Ugh, the kind with _letters_ in it.”

And _god_ , he can see it in his mind’s eye. He hasn’t been able to stop. A scrappy, screaming baby with Shepard’s big eyes and her soldier’s bellow. Shepard with the baby. _Their_ baby. And maybe they’re gone, maybe it’s crazy. But _maybe._ Maybe they’re out there somewhere, somewhere in that endless black stretch of space, if only he can get up there and find them.

Kaidan does the only reasonable thing, which is to keep drinking.

And much later, when the second moon’s going down, and the sky’s starting to glow with dawn, and nearly everyone is crashed out wherever they landed when the alcohol shut down their brains, Wrex leans in close.

“Battlemother,” says Wrex, softly. “We haven’t named one for ten thousand years.” He rubs at the ridge on his skull. The rhyncol fumes on his breath are so thick Kaidan could pass out just sitting next to him.

“Probably good she wasn’t born a Krogan.” Wrex huffs a laugh. “Out in front the army, we would have set a thousand worlds on fire, just so we could see the way the light reflected when she smiled.”

Yeah, Wrex tells the sweetest bedtime stories. Kaidan’s _definitely_ going to sleep now.

***

Repair timelines speed up significantly. A ship full of Krogan who brought a bunch of Quarian engineers means a lot of folks who can rebuild engines out of scrap metal and spit, and a lot of folks who can rip apart sheet metal with their bare hands.

On the morning when the Normandy breaks out of the atmosphere, straining at the seams but holding fast, there’s laughing, and crying, and a lot of people punching him and pulling him into hugs. There’s a rising strain of music, something orchestral and familiar and hymnal rising from the speakers in the cargo bay, Vega’s tenor boom and Cortez’s smooth voice echoing up with it through the hatches. _Ever singing, march we onward, victors in the midst of strife._

Kaidan is in the cockpit, fingers digging into the padded headrest of Joker’s seat. Staring out the window at the blue green glow of the planet, the enormous black of space. He’s crying, silently, and Joker’s worse, and neither of them say anything. Joker reaches back with one hand, and he laces his brittle fingers together with Kaidan’s.

EDI’s text notification pops up on Joker’s screen. _Jeff, I have calculated our course, and I would very much appreciate it if you took us home now._

Kaidan laughs. Joker chokes, scrubs his fist across his eyes with his free hand. “Yeah, okay, _fuck._ Major, permission to do exactly what my lady says?”

_Fuck,_ Kaidan doesn’t say. _Take us out into space, take us away from here, take me wherever I have to go to find them. I don’t care if it’s the end of the universe, I don’t care if it takes the rest of my life, take me to Shepard because the only place I ever want to be is with her. I want to know if her hair smells like I remember, I want to hear her yelling again, I want to hold our baby and then I want to do it again every day until the day I die._

He doesn’t really trust his voice, so he just nods, a jerk of his head. Joker squeeze their fingers together. Punches the panel and around them, the stars blur into long streaks of white.

In the cargo bay, Vega and Cortez are still singing.


End file.
